Hacking How can these roms be made to work with the EZFlash IV?

[Entroper]

I've recently acquired one of these and most of the roms that I suspected would be trouble work like a charm, but others do not.

In particular, I'd like to make the Classic NES Series games not say "Game Pak Error -- Turn the Power Off" (and the Famicom Mini series seems to return the same error, only in Japanese). I know this is a known issue, so please forgive my noob question, but the old threads I've found on this either say to patch them but don't say with what, or have dead links to patches or fixed roms. I do have GBATA, but I'm not sure what I need to do with it, or if I need another utility. I also get a black screen when trying to load Yoshi's Island, another game that I know has been made to work with these, but I'm not sure what to do with it. Also interested in more general advice as far as what to do with roms that don't play nice.

Thanks!

 

[FAST6191]

http://gbatemp.net/threads/buying-a-gba-flash-cart-in-2013.341203/page-18#post-4756995 is my general list of troublesome games that will take a small amount of effort to fix.
Classic NES and some of the later Famicom mini titles are some of the few GBA games to have anti piracy. Short version there is just use an emulator -- pocketnes and HVCA (the two main NES emulation options on the GBA) are far superior to Nintendo's offerings.

If you really absolutely must use the Nintendo offerings (no idea why you would but to each their own) then yeah you need patches, not sure what threads you found as the links have been up on filetrip for some years. http://filetrip.net/gba-downloads/t...m-mini-fix-patches-filetrip-fixed-f26544.html has them.

Yoshi's Island seems to be the classic soft reset vs hard reset issue. The short version is do a hard reset for this one; if you are using a hacked version of the kernel then it should do it by default, if you are using one made by the EZTeam (like the new SDHC supporting one or something) then hold L and press a to launch it.

 

[Jabodie]

If for some reason you can't hard reset by holding L and launching the game and it doesn't hard reset automatically (which is the case for me when I had 1.740 clear looks), update to 1.750, the newest official kernel of the EZ Flash website.

If you don't want the official theme (which is better than the old Star Wars theme, but not great), somebody applied Clearlooks v5 to it in the thread about the new kernel.

http://gbatemp.net/threads/ez-iv-ke...new-ez-iv-version-released-soon.377952/page-4

 

[Entroper]

Thanks for that. Turns out I already had 1.75 installed. Yoshi's Island now works, though does holding L mean that it won't save data?

I have no particular attachment to the Classic NES roms, no--just want to play the games (I have a cartridge of the Metroid port from this series and it's exactly the same anyway). Do I need to do anything in particular with an emulator like PocketNES to make it work, or just drop it on the card? Any particular directory? Does it work with the FDS BIOS?

I figure I'll get around to re-skinning it eventually, but for the moment I'm much more concerned with making all the games work.

 

[Jabodie]

No, holding L skips saving when you boot up the system. When you're navigating the menus for your ROMs, hold L as you start Yoshi's Island (hit A to load up the game). It should hard reset, meaning you'll see the Game Boy - Nintendo start up screen again, and the game should work fine. Other games have this hiccups (Double Dragon Advance and Ninja Five-0 being the ones I can think of off the top of my head).

And with the Classic NES games, you have to run them through an IPS patcher. gbata has an easy to use IPS patcher. You load up the ROM at the top, under file name, select the patch where it says IPS file, then hit patch and bam, your output ROM will be good to go on your EZ Flash. The filetrip download download has every IPS patch for every Classic NES series game

 

[FAST6191]

Pocketnes did not do FDS last time I checked but something might have happened since. For that most people that want FDS on the GBA you get to go with HVCA instead.
http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/index.php?title=Hvca

Several of the emulators do have some saving issues with the EZ4, fortunately there is http://ezflash.sosuke.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12660 to sort them (and also add exit patches if you wanted).

 

[Entroper]

Cool. I assume if I'm going to patch anything, I should apply these patches first, and then use EZ4Client to apply its own patching, or does the order matter? (I could easily try both ways, though I am not so keen on having to remove the miniSD card any more than I have to... incidentally, is there a easy way to pop them out?)

 

[FAST6191]

I heard the slots were tight on new carts. It should wear a bit and become easier eventually.

It should not matter what order you patch them in either, for some things it might matter (some hacks will try to change another hack or something) but in this case it should be fine.

 

[Entroper]

I now have every proper GBA rom in my library working, but I've run into a strange issue with HVCA. Earlier, I quickly threw about 10 roms in the add directory and got it working (using a renamed reset_ez4.bin, as suggested in that linked thread). But all subsequent attempts to add new roms and compile a new hvca.bin have resulted in failure no matter what I do. The first time I tried to run it it returned a mapper not found error, and then every subsequent time, just a black screen. In fact, I was only able to fix it by deleting all the new roms and restoring the original hvca.bin from the trash (as well as the two roms that I originally tried that it doesn't have mappers for, Castlevania III and VS SMB). I'm glad it's working again but would like to add at least another 10-15 roms. Anyone know what went wrong and how to fix it? Is there a limit on the number or the size of hvca.bin? Or might it be a saver issue?

Also, anyone know if any of the NES emulators for GBA can in fact run Castlevania III?

On an unrelated note, other roms that you must hold L in order to run: SimCity 2000 and all three Boktai games.